Chapter 541

Mark, a man hardened by the unforgiving realities of life in London, adjusted the straps of his backpack. The weight felt reassuring, a small comfort in the face of the expansive, unknown wilderness spreading before him and Sarah, his wife. It was meant to be a refreshing escape, this hike in the American Pacific Northwest, but something felt off from the very beginning.

"Sure this is the right way, love?" Sarah asked, her voice tinged with a nervousness she tried to conceal. She, unlike the perpetually cynical Mark, still held onto a sliver of optimism, a belief in the goodness of things. It was a trait he both admired and found unbelievably annoying.

"Yeah, should be," Mark responded, consulting the map. He traced the trail with a finger, a frown forming on his face. "According to this, we should be nearing a creek soon." But the landscape around them offered nothing but towering trees, their branches casting long, depressing shadows that played tricks on the eye.

Hours passed with no sign of any markers or the familiar natural landmarks the online hiking instructions outlined. The daylight had slowly begun turning orange, the color deepening and fading between each gap in the trees, changing from warm yellow-oranges to a muted sickly dark orange.

The woods, once alive with the songs of unseen birds, had fallen into an unnatural, complete quietness.

"I don't like this," Sarah stated, her voice no more than a scared whisper, she wrapped her arms around her petite waist and hugged herself trying to find some warmth in the cooling breeze and comfort.

"Don't worry so much, love, it will all be OK," Mark had no belief in the empty and basic words that exited his mouth, he spoke more for comfort for Sarah, as Mark, since stepping foot into the woods, was not okay, his head had pounded with the mother of all headaches.

The trail they thought they'd been following had disappeared completely, swallowed by a mass of ferns and thorny bushes, the overgrowth and change in landscape felt so abrupt and had happened almost silently within an instant change that was unnatural.

Mark's growing unease began evolving, transforming, changing quickly into cold, hard, bone-shattering fear.

Sarah stopped abruptly, her body going tense, her skin goosepimpling as the short hairs of her thin pale arms reacted and went from being horizontal to sitting and raising as if magnetically repelled away from the cold soft ground.

"Mark," she breathed out through her nose, rather than her opening and using her lips that refused to unlock to even slightly part.

Her mouth clamped firmly, a scared shiver ran up the back of Sarah, from the top of her arse and lower spine and traveled upwards like lightning towards her shoulders and lower skull, like she was suddenly wired to an unseen electric source. "Do you feel that?"

The feeling of dread and anticipation of impending doom crept over him as Mark tried to analyze the subtle, unexpected difference in the air.

Then, in a matter of what seemed to be a small selection of minutes that became confusing as if he was suddenly waking, time had vanished and warped as he stood completely still on a small piece of overgrown soil and mossy-green undergrowth.

A thick, consuming silence. The kind that screams. It pressed against his eardrums, making his head pound harder, and as each passing, quiet minute crept by in an instant like clockwork he noticed that his sense of direction was lost, the compass no longer able to decide, which Mark considered and compared to being in an active washing machine that endlessly rotated his location in place.

Panic set in as they looked towards Sarah, they both could hear sounds moving at pace, moving away at extreme pace and growing fainter and quiet with each pace they took, leaving them as the forest went deathly dark and almost black, as Sarah's panic crept in and panic washed through Mark at the same time.

They ran back the way they had come, to what they believed was back to the start, with the fear that had slowly and steadily consumed them, taking the time in this unreal forest and landscape and consuming all positive hopes that he had forced into his tone for Sarah.

Mark now spoke without holding back his concerns.

"We need to go back! That thing wasn't... natural," Mark had whispered his concerns at first, repeating the last two words much louder now that the realization was settling that it may already be too late for him, his tone of desperation grew increasingly manic as the adrenaline rushed through him like electric.

Sarah began crying and running the other way towards the sound they heard move with what felt like great speed. She now ran, Mark grabbing for her, taking ahold of her rucksack and holding firmly, shouting "It wasn't human, no animals should run on two legs."

The pair struggled, pushing and pulling the direction, the direction of "running to" that they would run became completely and utterly insignificant, Sarah was at war and wanted to be away from what had stalked, the darkness and death of these unknown trees and whatever this unreal land had turned into.

She was happy to try and run towards the beast or human running off, whatever it had been, if she ran anywhere then, and for long enough, the land may morph and revert to normal and show them safety.

After a few minutes of arguing over the directions, arguing and trying to use basic sense and basic reasoning with each other and attempting to agree the obvious options that now began blurring into one and lost the pair completely as an even more terrifying and all-encompassing fear consumed them with equal measure.

Sarah and Mark were completely exhausted and resigned to simply trying to keep together.

"This isn't natural. This can't be real." He took a step closer, he heard rustling in some nearby shrubs. Sarah didn't appear to notice it or to react at all, as her emotions were overloaded at 100%.

She ignored and dismissed his latest warning call. "Sarah, watch out" She simply screamed "Stop!" before falling to her knees and covering her head and ears with her thin arms and trembling soft, bare hands.

"It's close" Mark stated firmly in tone, the last and only calm word of that evening. His focus returned, switching from all things, returning completely back, with his complete care and focus, all aimed directly at his wife and at the incoming sounds approaching, it became the last time that the word calm, would match the sound.

Sarah did the opposite of calm as she continued with loud, piercing screams from the base of the forest floor where she'd collapsed and covered up a long and unknown quantity of moments beforehand. Sarah had lost time and perception.

The quiet, followed by noises approaching had overwhelmed and consumed her senses, reducing Sarah, her brain and whole thought process down to primal needs, the fear was raw and uncontrollable.

Sarah screamed one simple word "help!", repeating endlessly, until she had shouted at full strength, shouting at any human, screaming until she'd shouted her throat raw, and lost her power and use of sounds, screaming until her only audible attempt to scream became a rasp. She simply could not control the noise she let out now, even in fear of what she may draw from this unreal place towards her.

"Be quiet!" Sarah cried, her voice cracking as the light and landscape continued their morph. "Sarah! For love of... be quiet," He tried reasoning once more. Sarah's panic increased to his panic. He shouted loud over Sarah's blood-curdling screaming.

From nowhere. Something appeared. Then something grabbed Sarah, the beast of extreme speed that they first witnessed departing and circling away into a circle like wolves tracking their victims.

Mark fell as he was swiped. Then fell down as if collapsing instantly from a drug overdose, that felt like he'd instantly and completely stopped responding.

He fell to the floor without thought, dropping heavily, rolling over. He quickly struggled up, looking around trying to trace any remnants of the beast.

Then looked around to find a way to understand what direction this beast would likely approach from and the time the beast now has before its rapid approach to try and circle its victim to get lost for their final ambush.

Mark pulled his boots off for a few brief seconds and then the rucksack too, removing these quickly for two reasons. They both impeded his natural speed, reduced his maneuverability, and weighed him down with unnecessary resistance to movement as they rubbed or failed to flex for their unnatural activity.

More importantly, and unbeknownst to his own, internal thinking and his internal voice that never once turned a sound in his head, the reason he now felt and acted this way was through complete shock and desperation and through an unconscious and deep animal desire to go towards danger and risk.

His deep primal response system and his male, aggressive need to attack what he feels would be his victim soon. His actions did nothing at all in line with his desired plans of surviving this, Mark thought his act would save him from his aggressor.

Mark found himself stood in silence once again as his breathing began to pound inside of his ears once more. Sarah was still at war, now in full hysterics that completely disregarded anything he had ever known about Sarah's quiet and placid personality.

She was kicking, rolling around on the soft muddy and mossy green undergrowth like a young baby screaming for their mother. Mark ran at Sarah screaming and cursing her to try and force the message to "Shut up! NOW." He reached down to grab Sarah by her clothing and to yank her violently upward for some forced escape from here and away.

Before touching or connecting any grip on Sarah's thin jacket or body, he was intercepted and caught by an unexpected force of significant pace and power. From behind, not the place he believed the direction of travel.

Mark's stomach began to turn upwards towards his heart as he took impact from the beast running at Mark at high, powerful and lethal, animal speed, the pain, so intense that his throat opened, his stomach lurched towards his throat before releasing a roar from deep down in his gut that he had not made since playing games with friends, deep in his young teenage life at football, playing sport on cold icy weekend mornings with the male camaraderie he now felt towards killing the animal charging him from behind.

As he stood up from his kneeling position and attempted a small running-pace leap forward to save Sarah from any potential danger or attacks of unknown beasts and sources of danger in this woodland setting that morphed like the horror stories he laughed away as fakes.

Mark could not compute any logic at all that he now could react before taking the attack, Mark only thought his leap forward towards his partner could save her life, nothing was aimed towards defense.

With all his powers that his body has taken under primal animal instincts he could no longer stop from going full pace and as angry, violent and as aggressive as human nature permitted him and enabled, not ever considered, even momentarily to take steps back and run for safety as all control of sensible actions went, completely abandoned for his animal urge to strike.

As Mark had reacted, taking a first running leap for the imagined oncoming strike from an evil, circling woodland beast, he then went for Sarah's last audible crying and desperate shouting that changed instantly with impact towards her and in unison his, into complete silence like some remote controller hit the sound. Silence so dense and terrifying, and sudden like Mark had been punched on his jaw so powerfully and perfectly in an exact pressure-point placement. He felt that he'd collapsed. Mark believed at this point as he was losing all reality, he had now been fully winded.

This dense quiet did more to add fear than before, silence in sound. Then another impact. Now he fell, hitting his knee and skull into soft, thin mud and moss. Now winded, unable to act, all senses fading.

Darkness closed in fast, his head pounding louder like he felt the world coming at him in 360 degrees, with the force of every item around him and not only the noise around them and every piece of noise that traveled to fill in silence from miles outside.

Mark began his own fall to his death with loud piercing drums filling every bit of sense, the pace faster like he would physically, soon, die as a natural event, as all human parts now failed and became overwhelming and he took it as a clear sign he will pass from this dark place in nature, unable to find sense and logic to help in planning anything, survival had gone like time and now just seconds, moments had all failed his desperate sense of living.

Mark failed. His body falling at speed with only sound, sense and dark now for comfort. This place was a trap for him that he fell right into, the fear so complete he took full and all-in commitment to attack with all remaining and any life possible that remained.

Death soon came as it circled as they watched him slowly realize this world, as it felt and as it showed Mark every part of how, why and when he may fail and his survival options failed along with him, taking comfort for death.

Mark awoke and gasped loudly for air before finding Sarah's dead cold face facing him, her eyes lifeless. He had died too, only Sarah went without choice, her last and only fear coming true.